Notices by Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr), page 3

After all, most Americans can safely drink their tap water, a novelty in human civilization, whose history amounts to short periods of thriving shattered at regular intervals by water-borne plagues. The fact that most of us can safely drink our water, but people who live in Flint (or remote indigenous reservations, or Louisiana's Cancer Alley) *can't* tells you that these neighbors of ours are being deliberately poisoned, as we know precisely how *not* to poison them.

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Think of all the times you've heard about how the gerontocracy that dominates the House and the Senate is incapable of making good internet policy because "they're out of touch and don't understand technology." Even if this is true (and sometimes it is, as when Sen Ted Stevens ranted about the internet being "a series of tubes," not "a dump truck"), that doesn't mean that Congress can't make good internet policy.

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This doesn't always get it right, but when it does work, your medicine doesn't poison you, the bridge doesn't collapse as you drive over it, and your airplane doesn't fall out of the sky.

Expert regulators work with legislators to provide an empirical basis for turning political choices into empirically grounded policies.

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This process is by no means perfect, but, like democracy, it's the worst form of knowledge creation except for all others which have been tried.

Expert regulators bring this method to governance. They seek comment on technical matters of public concern, propose regulations based on them, invite all parties to comment on these regulations, weigh the evidence, and then pass a rule.

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The scientific method has an answer for this, too: refereed, adversarial peer review. The editors of major journals act as umpires in disputes among experts, exercising their editorial discernment to decide which questions are sufficiently in flux as to warrant taking up, then asking parties who disagree with a novel idea to do their damndest to punch holes in it.

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The method is designed as a process of continual refinement, where new evidence is continuously brought forward and evaluated, and where cherished ideas that are invalidated by new evidence are discarded and replaced with new ideas.

So how are we to survive and thrive in a world of questions we ourselves can't answer, that experts disagree about, and whose answers are only ever provisional?

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Sure, that doctor who works for a company with a new cancer cure might just be shilling for a big bonus - but maybe they joined the company because they have an informed, truthful belief that the new drug might *really* cure cancer.

What's more, the scientific method itself speaks against the idea of there being one, permanent answer to *any* big question.

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Shortcuts for evaluating these disagreements ("distrust any expert whose employer has a stake in a technical question") are crude and often lead you astray. If you dismiss any expert employed by a firm that wants to bring a new product to market, you will lose out on the expertise of people who are so legitimately excited about the potential improvements of an idea that they quit their jobs and go to work for whomever has the best chance of realizing a product based on it.

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The *reason* we have agencies like the FDA (and enabling legislation like the Pure Food and Drug Act) is that markets failed to keep people from being murdered by profit-seeking snake-oil salesmen and radium suppository peddlers.

These vital questions need to be answered by experts, but that's easier said than done. After all, experts disagree about this stuff.

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Practically speaking, you aren't going to develop your own robust meatpacking hygiene standards, nor your own water treatment program, nor your own Boeing 737 MAX inspection protocol.

Markets don't solve this either. If they did, we wouldn't have to worry about chunks of Boeing jets falling on our heads.

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You could do the same for cell biology, virology, and epidemiology and decide whether to wear a mask and/or get an MRNA vaccine and/or buy a HEPA filter.

You *could* do any of these. You might even be able to do two or three of them. But you can't do all of them, and that list is just a small slice of all the highly technical questions that stand between you and misery or an early grave.

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You could figure out how to assess the Common Core curriculum for pedagogical soundness. You could learn the material science needed to evaluate the soundness of the joists that hold the roof up over your head. You could acquire the biology and chemistry chops to decide whether you want to trust produce that's been treated with Monsanto's Roundup pesticides.

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Expert agencies are often all that stands between us and extreme misadventure, even death. The modern world is full of modern questions, the kinds of questions that require a high degree of expert knowledge to answer, but also the kinds of questions whose answers you'd better get right.

You're not stupid, nor are you foolish. You could go and learn everything you need to know to evaluate the firmware on your antilock brakes and decide whether to trust them.

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What the Supreme Court began, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are now poised to finish, through the "Department of Government Efficiency," a fake agency whose acronym ("DOGE") continues Musk's long-running cryptocurrency memecoin pump-and-dump. The new department is absurd - imagine a department devoted to "efficiency" with two co-equal leaders who are both famously incapable of getting along with anyone - but that doesn't make it any less dangerous.

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Since Trump hijacked the Supreme Court, his backers have achieved many of their policy priorities: legalizing bribery, formalizing forced birth, and - with the *Loper Bright* case, neutering the expert agencies that regulate business:

https://jacobin.com/2024/07/scotus-decisions-chevron-immunity-loper

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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/21/policy-based-evidence/#decisions-decisions

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@hobart https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/16/how-to-make-the-least-worst-mastodon-threads/

@OptOut @gregorykohn no sweat

@jimfenton instructions here: https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/16/how-to-make-the-least-worst-mastodon-threads/

@andor Here you go: https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/13/two-decades/#hfbd

812 words (85779 total) on Enshittification (a nonfiction book about platform decay for Fararr, Straus, Giroux) #DailyWords